I'm a former senior editor at Fortune Small Business magazine, and I have written about entrepreneurship for publications such as Crain's New York Business, Fortune, Money, Working Mother, CBS MoneyWatch, and Good Housekeeping. I'm also co-founder of 2ookfreelancer.com, a community for indie professionals looking to build a thriving business in today's crazy economy.

Americans Haven't Lost Their Entrepreneurial Mojo

You might think that the state of the U.S. economy would hurt Americans’ attitudes about entrepreneurship.

But that’s not the case. The 2012 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, released last month by Babson College, shows that 43% of U.S. adults believed there are good opportunities for entrepreneurs in the U.S. in 2012– up from 36% in 2011. The number is the highest since the study began in 1999. The study surveys 198,000 adults in 69 economies, providing a rare, comprehensive snapshot of entrepreneurial activity around the planet.

Americans top the world in confidence about their entrepreneurial skills and their ability to succeed as entrepreneurs. Only 32% reported that fear of failure would discourage them from starting a business. That number has, understandably, dipped since 2008, when the percentage was 25%, but it still shows that many Americans have the risk-taking spirit necessary to start a business–even after the Great Recession.

Women are fairly well-represented in entrepreneurship, relative to other nations the researchers classified as “innovation driven,” though there’s plenty of room for improvement. While 15% of adult males in the U.S. are involved in early-stage business activity, 10% of women are, according to the report. In contrast, in the European Union, an average of 10% of men and 5% of women involved in startup activity.

On a global level, what sparked people to act on the desire to start a business was either necessity or opportunity, according to the report. In the U.S., just 13% of respondents have plans to start a business. That’s higher than Japan, where just 2 percent plan to do so. But it pales in comparison to other innovation-driven economies like France, where 17% expressed such plans and Taiwan, where 25% are gearing up to start a business in the immediate future.

Typically, what will spur an American entrepreneur to pull the trigger is spotting an opportunity in the marketplace. In the U.S., a whopping 59% started a business because of a perceived opportunity, vs. 21% who did so out of necessity.

I suspect that often Americans’ motivations’ are mixed. A corporate executive who gets laid off and starts a consulting firm may have a nice severance package and savings to rely on for a while–and be inspired by the opportunity to profit from a new business opportunity–but may also be looking to replace the income earned from a high-paying job.

What’s ahead? Many of these businesses are likely to stay small. While 6.6% of U.S. adults expected to create up to 5 jobs in their businesses, only 1.7% thought they would create 20 or more. To give you some context: In the European Union, 3.9% of adults expected to create up to 5 jobs, and .9% projected creating 20 or more jobs. In Columbia, where entrepreneurs were highly optimistic about job creation, 8.5% expected to create up to 5 jobs, while 4.3% thought they would be able to create 20 or more.

To get our economy humming, policymakers would be wise to study what’s helping the job creators in countries with higher numbers than ours. What laws and incentives do they have in a place? What deterrents have they removed? As the authors of the report point out, what works in one country may not work in another. But it’s still worth asking questions like these. Americans’ positive attitudes toward entrepreneurship are a natural resource ready to be tapped to solve our jobs crisis and other economic problems.

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